Analysis of Availability of High-resolution Satellite and UAV Multispectral Images for Forest Burn Severity Classification

Damage of forest fire should be investigated quickly and accurately for recovery, compensation and prevention of secondary disaster. Using remotely sensed data, burn severity is investigated based on the difference of reflectance or spectral indices before and after forest fire. Recently, the use of high resolution satellite and UAV imagery is increasing, but it is not easy to obtain an image before forest fire that cannot be predicted where and when. This study tried to analyze availability of high-resolution images and supervised classifiers on the burn severity classification. Two supervised classifiers were applied to the KOMPSAT-3A image and the UAV multispectral image acquired after the forest fire. The maximum likelihood (MLH) classifier use absolute value of spectral reflectance and the spectral angle mapper (SAM) classifier use pattern of spectra. As a result, in terms of spatial resolution, the classification accuracy of the UAV image was higher than that of the satellite image. However, both images shown very high classification accuracy, which means that they can be used for classification of burn severity. In terms of the classifier, the maximum likelihood method showed higher classification accuracy than the spectral angle mapper because some classes have similar spectral pattern although they have different absolute reflectance. Therefore, burn severity can be classified using the high resolution multispectral images after the fire, but an appropriate classifier should be selected to get high accuracy.